Professor Avedis Donabedian (1919-2000)

Of Armenian descent, he was born in Beirut in 1919 and grew up near Jerusalem. In 1954, he moved to Boston, and the following year, he graduated from Harvard University in Public Health. He worked for 28 years in Ann Arbor at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan.


His contribution to the systematization of knowledge within the health sciences, particularly focused on improving healthcare quality, has been recognized worldwide and is deserving of several awards. He developed the structure, process, and outcome approach, which became the foundation for measuring and improving the quality of healthcare. These contributions are documented in Evaluation of the Quality of Medical Care (1966), and he endeavored to define all aspects of quality in health systems and proposed models for their measurement; they can be found in more than 100 articles and 11 books.


He was also a poet and a literature enthusiast, capable of reading fluently in six different languages. In fact, he wrote poetry throughout his life, and near his death, he wrote that it was in his poetry where one could best appreciate who he was.


In conclusion, he was an extraordinary person who, with his generosity, enriched the lives of those who knew him.